Quotes About Death

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.

The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;O life, no life, but lively form of death;O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.

Then haste we down to meet thy friends and foes; To place thy friends in ease, the rest in woes. For here though death doth end their misery, I'll there begin their endless tragedy.

BEL-IMPERIA: Oh let me go; for in my troubled eyes Now may'st thou read that life in passion dies. HORATIO: Oh stay a while, and I will die with thee; So shalt thou yield, and yet have conquered me.

VICEROY OF PORTUGAL. ...My late ambition hath distain'd my faith; My breach of faith occasion'd bloody wars; Those bloody wars have spent my treasure; And with my treasure my people's blood; And with their blood, my joy and best belov'd My best belov'd, my sweet and only son. O, wherefore went I not to war myself The cause was mine; I might have died for both: My years were mellow, his but young and green; My death were natural, but his was forc'd.

Soldiers are in the business of death-inflicting it, and, as little as possible, receiving it. They must be careful, but they also must take risks. And they reduce those risks by planning.

How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense.7

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written in embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble race is mine.

While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.

Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.

God was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no one has yet written the obituary of the Devil.

I cannot wait to be dead. I cannot wait.

A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings. Denied nature's exemption from creativity, we are indentured servants of the imaginary until the hour of our death, when the final harassments of imagination will beset us.

For those keeping track, the only rights we have are these: to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to know that everyone's body will perish through a process of corruption or mortal trauma. (This is presuming that one has been brought to term and has survived to a certain age, neither being a natural birthright. Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.)

fatal vehicular misadventure.

For the rest of the earth's organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else.

Two tiny corpses, one male and the other female, rattle around that enormous closet in my bedroom. Though deceased, still they are quick enough to hide themselves whenever I need to enter the closet to retrieve something.

An individual's demarcations as a being, not his trespass of them, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being something special and not a freak of chance, a product of blind mutations. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities—having absolute control of what we are and not what we need to be so that we may survive the most unsavory facts of life and death—would untether us from the moorings of our self-limited selves.

In fact, they use everyone and have always used everyone, because they are from the old time, the time before all the worlds awoke from a long and mindless night. And these dreams, these things that are called dreams, are still working to throw us back into that great mad darkness, to exhaust each one one of us in our lonely sleep and to use up everyone until death.

André of the graveyards—a sociable corpse.

God is dead," wrote Mainländer, "and His death was the life of the world." Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator's self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out.

Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die.